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Zynga is discontinuing this game. Apparently, the company downsized and the game presented too many bugs to be worth fixing. Which is a huge shame, because by all accounts they won’t be refunding anyone their money (even people who have invested in the game in the past few weeks). My game stopped loading last week, and so I deleted it off my phone.

Dream Zoo has become my proxy for my desire to have lots of pets. I still have Bandit and Jacoby, but somehow taking care of a virtual zoo makes more sense right now for me.

One of the tricks to Dream Zoo (not surprisingly) is having lots of neighbors to visit. And there are codes here and there, but I thought I’d make a place dedicated to posting Dream Zoo codes to help other players. Feel free to comment and add your own code. Tips are also appreciated from players who have figured out a strategy that works.

Here are my tips:

1. Have a few rhinos and sequester them in their own areas, each set off by paths or just open space. Give each rhino 5 sections of 60% open grassland touching each other. Your champion coins will go from 15K to 53K for each rhino. These are your treasure chests. If you start from a common rhino and breed your way up, you’ll get paid every 12 hours. If you start from rare, you’ll get paid every 15 hours. I recommend starting from common. Having a few extra rhinos makes a few expansions worth the cost.

2. If you’re feeling like you want even more coins from your plains animals, you can move them to the rhino grassy areas (and move the rhinos out each time), cash in, and move the rhinos back. As long as an animal is within a certain environment at payout time, you’ll get that payout. That is, if you move a rhino back just before you cash him out, he’ll still get the 53K.

3. I can’t stress this enough — have a nursery area right by your dock. Put any babies in these sections. Visitors can see them right away and help speed up your babies. Not everyone plays on an iPad — Dream Zoo is very flaky and crashes A LOT on Droids, and I think lots of Droid players just play whatever hearts and coins they can at the dock and then move on, for fear of the app crashing when they explore a zoo. You can have 2 or 3 nursery areas (I have 2, but recommend 3). Have each one set off by paths to give them a little boost at payout time (or move the expecting animals back to their sections, where you undoubtedly have a few booster areas for them). You’ll need them separate from the surrounding sections anyway, probably plains or winter, and why not add a few percentage points payout with a couple of dirt paths, which cost only 100 coins?

3a. The Move tool is your friend. Use it frequently to increase coin payout and move expecting families to the dock nursery area.

4. Put plains animals next to the nursery area and keep them there so that your neighbors can get in and out quickly if they want to. Plains animals are almost always dirty. Next common dirty animals, in my experience, are koalas and puffins. Washing and feeding plains animals isn’t lucrative, but does get a quick heart (if they are placed near the dock). Exploring for more exotic dirty animals takes time and the risk of DZ crashing, but it gets you more coin if you’re looking for both coins and hearts on your travels.

5. Never pass up a dirty or hungry rhino. Every now and then when you’re visiting a neighbor, you’ll get lucky by finding one. Clean him, feed him. They give lots of coins.

6. Speed up babies when you’re visiting other zoos. It does not give you any coins, but it can make you a favorite neighbor and get your own babies sped up. This is especially important in underwater zoos.

7. Underwater Zoos are expensive. A few initial animals cost a reasonable amount of coin, but it won’t be long until you’re spending 60,000 coins per safari (and, of course, they don’t come with guarantees that you’ll get the animal and rarity that you want). If your zoo grade matters to you and you’re trying to maintain an A, for instance, get ready to pay out a LOT of money for your underwater zoo. Some of my neighbors are on level 60 and don’t even have an underwater zoo because they are just focusing on their animal park. Not a bad strategy. I have an underwater zoo, but my grade is currently a B- and I’m trying to boost it with every coin, heart and stork I get and it’s taking a LONG time to budge.

8. Underwater Zoo babies take a long time to deliver. Again, I suggest having a nursery area right by the landing area so that your neighbors can help you out as easily as possible.

9. Similar to my tip about keeping plains animals close to the dock, keep manta rays and sharks next to your landing area for your underwater zoo.

10. When you have 2 storks, save all your cash (Zoo Bucks, whatever) for a 3rd stork.

Here are the Zoo codes I’ve found. Sorry if not all of them work…some zoos may be abandoned, etc. Feel free to add your own in the comments. I’ll start with my own code. The rest are alphabetical, to avoid duplication on my part.

Not with another animal this time (for the last 2 years, it’s been a pet a year with Bandit, then Jacoby), but with twins! The whole process of being pregnant so far (19 weeks today) has been an adventure, to say the least. Twins are an entirely different story from singletons, says everyone who’s ever been pregnant with twins. I can safely say, though, I haven’t gotten actual “morning” sickness, which I’ll be forever grateful for!

I’m mainly constantly and completely exhausted, which makes even walking <a href=”http://bunnyblab.com/”>Jacoby (our greyhound, whom joined our family/zoo December 2 of last year)</a> difficult with any regularity. I long for the days (and he does, too!) when I can walk with him again for 4 miles, but this time with 2 babies in tow! I miss those long, relaxed walks. We’ve been mainly walking just around the few blocks near our house lately. Paul walks him when he’s home, and I tend to walk him when he’s away, but I’ve been struggling to do so.

I finally hired a sophomore student from the high school across the street this week to be his dog walker, and she just loves him. Today was his second day with Jennifer, and he already got the idea that she will happily walk him around and bring him home. Yesterday, he didn’t know if she was going to dognap him or what, and made his walks very short because of his uncertainty. Today he got it and she commented about how happy he was on his walks. Which makes me happy, too, and grateful that I found Jennifer, who is a sweet, sweet girl who loves animals.

So my 40-week due date is technically April 14, but doctors almost never let mothers of twins go past 38 or 39 weeks, and twins are unpredictable in their delivery timetable, so we could meet our babies anytime after mid-February (which would be 32 weeks).

Jacoby likes to cuddle and nose-bump my baby bump and I think he’ll be an AMAZING big doggie brother to the babies. I think he’ll be one of those dogs who comes to cry at me (not bark, because barking’s beneath him! LOL) when the babies need something. And he’ll probably want to sleep in their nursery on occasion, too, just to make sure they’re okay.

Bandit will run from them and their crying at first, but she’ll eventually warm up to them when she realizes they won’t hurt her and they’re not going anywhere.

SweetPea will notice the crying, but won’t care much about anything else. She’ll get used to it, too, as she’s gotten used to so many big changes in her life so far. She’s a trooper, but aloof and kind of a loner, especially for a bunny (they’re usually very social animals). She likes to run around and sniff parts of Jacoby when he’s laying down, but mainly she chooses to hang out on her own. She’s friendly with both Jacoby and Bandit (definitely not afraid of either), but I wouldn’t say she’s buddies with them. She likes them, but doesn’t cuddle with them. That’s just her personality.

My friend and HRC cohort Marlene Wilhelm visited Scot Haney on WFSB’s Better Connecticut on April 1, 2010 on behalf of The House Rabbit Connection. We discussed why parents should not include rabbits in Easter baskets. Rabbits can live 14 years and potential owners should be prepared for taking care of the entire lifespan of the pet.

Beckett was a frisky bunny with his new stuffed animal bunny, but this is exactly why you should fix your bunnies! HRC spays and neuters every rabbit before we adopt them out.

Marlene did most of the talking. I was trying to keep Beckett from misbehaving too much, and changing the rating of Better Connecticut from G to XXX!

So I’ve had one bunny rubber stamp that I’ve had for maybe 8 years, but — how wonderful is the Internet?! — there’s a great store on eBay that I just found called Rubber Hedgehog and it’s got all sorts of wonderful animal stamps. If you do any kind of crafting (and stamping is about the easiest craft you can take up if you’re intimidated), go there and get lots of great supplies!

From April 23-25, greyhounds and their owners will take over Gettysburg, PA and most of the hotels in town for an annual gathering called Greyhounds in Gettysburg. And we’ve registered (you only have a few days left — registration closes 4/1) and booked our room at the Comfort Inn in town.

Highlights of the schedule (in addition to all the vendors slated to display) are ghost tours at night, a singing and dancing music and comedy greyhound review, greyhound costume contests, parades, a greyt speed run, a fun run for greys, and a blessing of the hounds. Check out the pix of years past!

We can’t wait to meet new friends, buy a nice springtime martingale collar, and play with other greyhound lovers and their pups! We’ll post pictures after the event.

Did you know it’s illegal for cats in International Falls, Minnesota, to chase dogs up telephone poles. Now, I ask ya, when’s the last time you saw a dog up a telephone pole?! Check out Springtime Inc.’s list of ridiculous animal laws. Come for the humor, stay for the vitamins!

And try not to think of the actual stories that prompted lawmakers in these towns to develop these laws to begin with!

So I just played the video in the last post of Jacoby rooing and he was cocking his head all funny when his Daddy was rooing, then when he heard me chime in and himself start to howl, he rooed right along with the music.

One of the unexpected joys of having a greyhound is having him sing to me. Sometimes it turns into barking, but it’s mainly singing. And I think it’s lovely!

Bandit and SweetPea had a very normal Valentine’s Day. Bandit got a few extra cuddles, but all was normal on the kitty and bunny front.

Fonya, John Boy and Jacoby take a break

Jacoby, on the other hand, had a very busy day with me. First, we went to our first Greyt Fun meetup. I thought that maybe it would just be he and I walking in Callahan State Park, as Jini had told me she may not be able to come with Fonya (who I deemed Jacoby’s Valentine). But it turns out that Karen and Mitch showed up unexpectedly (LOVE when that happens!), so Jacoby met their John Boy and it turned out to be a party! John Boy had run 100 races (won 15 of them) and just retired in November ’09, so he’s a newbie to the spoiled rotten lifestyle, but apparently taking to it very well.

So we walked in Callahan for about an hour and we talked about our greyhounds, which was a lot of fun. John Boy and Jacoby, both being boys, had a peeing contest to see who could pee on the most things. I’m not sure who won, but they had fun competing!

After our walk, it was off to some pet stores in Framingham/Natick to post some flyers advertising our new playgroup. PetSmart actually didn’t have any Community Bulletin board, but PetCo and Pet World both did and were very nice about me pinning a bunch of flyers up.

So that was a lot of jumping in and out of the back of my Highlander. But also a lot of opportunities for Jacoby to pee on things right outside the store, where countless other dogs have peed before. So that was fun for him.

Then we were going to go home, but on the way we passed right by Butter Worth Park, where Paul had placed a geocache. I thought it was a great opportunity to check on the dryness/winter steadfastness of said cache, so we parked and headed across the park to the trees, Moto Droid in hand, GPSr and camera hanging from my belt loops. I was so geeked out; Steve Ballmer would have been impressed.

We’re almost to the trees when an unleashed black lab comes running at full tilt up to Jacoby (unhindered by the weak “come back here” by his people) and slams on the brakes a few feet away. Jacoby freezes, trying to instill calm in this frantic dog. So sniff sniff happens. Labby gets all up in my boy’s junk, but Jacoby’s okay with that. Then out of nowhere, the lab decides to (are you sitting down?) mount Jacoby, which is frankly tough, because the lab isn’t a huge dog and Jacoby kinda is. The instant this happens, my marshmallow of a 76-pound dog turns surprisingly fierce and I don’t even have time to get in the way before Jacoby’s growled and warning-snapped his way out of trouble. This is the second time I’ve ever heard Jacoby growl (I got a growl from him once for taking his Greenie away in mid-chew, but I body blocked him and cut that right out) and first I’ve seen him snap at anything.

I was all tuckered out after my big day!

I was so proud of my boy. He really handled it beautifully. He was nice until it was clear Labby wasn’t going to be, then he wouldn’t take any guff, dog-style. Needless to say, Labby ran back to his family. I praised Jacoby all the way to the cache, which was probably another 25 yards or so. Jacoby certainly kept an eye on where that dog was the whole time we were in the park. Labby actually ran at us again when we were on our way to the car, but I positioned myself between the two dogs, and Labby decided about 20 feet away to make a circle and run back to safety. I bet he was thinking, “If the dog is that mean and the person praises him, how mean must the person be?!”

So good dog owners and bad, Jacoby had seen them all on Sunday. And he had enough excitement for a whole week. “Home” sounded like a really good destination when we got back in the car. Alas, he is a dog. So the next time I get my keys and tell him he’s going somewhere with me, he’ll be just as excited. God love canines and their endless sense of adventure!